The Ways of War

By Tom Kettle

"The Ways of War" contains a collection of essays written by Tom Kettle with a memoir written by his wife. Tom Kettle, an Irish nationalist, and soldier, made a case for fighting a war against Prussian aggressive expansionism. This led him to join the British army to fight the aggression. These essays explain events that shaped and influenced the war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Press
• Release date: Nov 5, 2021
• ISBN: 4066338092472

Book preview

Tom Kettle

The Ways of War

Published by Good Press, 2022

[e-mail]

EAN 4066338092472

Table of Contents

MEMOIR

WHY IRELAND FOUGHT

I.— Prelude

II.— The Bullying of Serbia

III.— The Crime Against Belgium

UNDER THE HEEL OF THE HUN

I.— A World Adrift

II.— Europe against the Barbarians

III.— Termonde

IV.— Malines

V.— In Ostend

TREATING BELGIUM DECENTLY

BELGIUM IN PEACE WORK OF THREE GENERATIONS—COMPARISONS WITH IRELAND—SOME MEMORIES

G.H.Q.

ZUR ERINNERUNG A LETTER TO AN AUSTRIAN FELLOW-STUDENT

SILHOUETTES FROM THE FRONT

I.— The Way to the Trenches

II.— The Long Endurance

III.— Rhapsody on Rats

THE NEW FRANCE

THE SOLDIER-PRIESTS OF FRANCE

THE GOSPEL OF THE DEVIL

I.— Bismarck

II.— Nietzsche

III.— Treitschke and the Professors

TRADE OR HONOUR?

MEMOIR

Table of Contents

My husband in his last letter to his brother, written on the 8th of September, 1916, on the battlefield, expressed the wish that I should write a memoir of him as a preface to his war book. It is only at his express instance that I would have undertaken the writing of such a memoir, as there are many obvious reasons—notably two—why I am unfitted for that high duty. I have not the literary gifts of many of his distinguished friends, who in writing of him would have exercised their powers of sympathetic understanding and appreciation to the uttermost. But the personal relationship is an even greater handicap. If the reader will accept me as his comrade—since he has honoured me with the proud distinction—I shall do my best to interpret the soul-side with which he faced the world. For my shortcomings, I must crave indulgence. I only bring to this task the vision of love.

I shall give hereafter a biographical sketch, but first I wish to deal with his attitude to the war and a few points which he desired to be emphasised.

What urged him—the scholar, the metaphysician, the poet, above all the Irishman, irrevocably and immutably Irish, the man of peace, who had nothing of the soldier except courage—to take a commission in the British Army and engage in the cruel and bloody business of war? His motives for taking this step, he wished to be made clear beyond misrepresentation. It should be unnecessary to do this, as he proclaimed them on many platforms and in many papers. His attitude and action are the natural sequence and logic of his character and ideals. Since I first knew him, he loved to call himself a capitaine routier of freedom, and that is the alpha and omega of his whole personality. As Mr. Lynd has said, he was not a Nationalist through love of a flag, but through love of freedom. It was this love of freedom that made him in his student days in the Royal University lead the protest against the playing of God Save the King at the conferring of Degrees. The words of the Students’ manifesto went, We desire to protest against the unjust, wasteful and inefficient Government of which that air is a symbol. It was the same love of freedom that made him during the Boer War distribute in the streets of Dublin anti-recruiting leaflets. The Tom Kettle who did these things, who said in an election speech in 1910 that for his part he preferred German Invasion to British Finance, was the same Tom Kettle who believed it Ireland’s duty in 1914 to take the sword against Germany as the Ally of England.

This war is without parallel, he wrote in August, 1914; Britain, France, Russia, enter it, purged from their past sins of domination. France is right now as she was wrong in 1870, England is right now as she was wrong in the Boer War, Russia is right now as she was wrong on Bloody Sunday.

In August and September, he acted as war correspondent for the Daily News, and in this capacity was a witness of the agony of Belgium. He returned to Ireland burning with indignation against Prussia. He referred to Germany as the outlaw of Europe. It is impossible not to be with Belgium in this struggle, he wrote to the Daily News; it is impossible any longer to be passive. Germany has thrown down a well-considered challenge to all the forces of our civilisation. War is hell, but it is only a hell of suffering, not of dishonour, and through it, over its flaming coals, Justice must walk, were it on bare feet.

It was as an Irish soldier in the army of Europe and civilisation that he entered the war. He was horrified, said Mr. Lynd very truly, by the spectacle of a bully let loose on a little nation. He was horrified, too, at the philosophic lie at the back of all this greed of territory and power. He was horrified at seeing the Europe he loved going down into brawling and bloody ruin. Not least—and no one can understand contemporary Ireland who does not realise this—he was horrified by the thought that if Germany won, Belgium would be what he had mourned in Ireland—a nation in chains. An international Nationalist—that was the mood in which he offered his services to the War Office.

I think the chief reason his motives have been misunderstood is that few have gone to the trouble of understanding his wide outlook. He was a European. He was deeply steeped in European culture. He was au courant with European politics. He knew his France, his Germany, his Russia as well as we know our Limerick, Cork and Belfast. Mr. Healy once said his idea of a nation ended with the Kish lightship. Tom Kettle’s ideal was an Ireland identified with the life of Europe. Ireland, he wrote, awaits her Goethe who will one day arise to teach her that, while a strong nation has herself for centre, she has the universe for circumference.... My only programme for Ireland consists in equal parts of Home Rule and the Ten Commandments. My only counsel to Ireland is, that to become deeply Irish, she must become European.

That counsel was given six years before the war. It was acting on that counsel that he deemed it right to make the final sacrifice, and in a European struggle sign his ideal with the seal of his blood. England and English thought had nothing to do with his attitude to the war. England happened to be on the side of Justice. He acknowledges that, but says rather bitterly, England goes to fight for liberty in Europe but junkerdom in Ireland. Mr. Shane Leslie is absolutely right when he says, He died for no Imperialistic concept, no fatuous Jingoism.

Let this war go forward, he wrote to the Daily News in 1914, on its own merits and its own strong justice. After the war of the peoples, let us have the peoples’ peace. Let us drop statecraft and return to the Ten Commandments—now that we have got such a good bit of the way back.

Mr. Padraic Colum, in a memoir of my husband in the Irish-American paper, Ireland, says: When the Germans broke into Belgium, he advised the Irish to join the British Army and to fight for the rights of small nationalities. Had death found him in those early days he would at least have died for a cause he believed in. I think Mr. Colum, if only for the sake of an old friendship, might have troubled to understand the idea for which Tom Kettle died, and in which he believed to the end. Does Mr. Colum mean to suggest that my husband no longer believed in the maintenance of the rights of small nationalities? Was his enthusiasm for Belgium quenched—Belgium the heroic who preferred to lose all that she might gain her own soul? Is not Belgium still an invaded country? And even if England juggles with Ireland’s liberty, is not the fight for truth and justice to go on? As my husband says in this volume, Ireland had a duty not only to herself but to the world... and whatever befell, the path taken by her must be the path of honour and justice.

In one of my last letters from him, he speaks his faith, even if it is the faith of a sad and burdened soul: It is a grim and awful job, and no man can feel up to it. The waste—the science of waste and bloodshed! How my heart loathes it and yet it is God’s only way to Justice.

Mr. Colum proceeds: He knew by the dreams he remembered that his place should have been with those who died for the cause of Irish Nationality. I postulate that Tom Kettle died most nobly for the cause of Irish Nationality, in dying for the cause of European honour.

Mr. Colum continues: He knew she (Ireland) would not now take her eyes from the scroll that bears the names of Pearse and Plunkett and O’Rahilly and so many others, and yet, Thomas Kettle at the last would not have grudged these men Ireland’s proud remembrance. I think, too, I may confidently assert that Tom Kettle’s name will be entered on the scroll of Irish patriots, and that he has earned, and will have, Ireland’s proud remembrance quite as much as the rebel leaders whose valour and noble disinterestedness he honoured, but whose ideals he most emphatically did not share.

Mr. Leslie is in shining contrast to Mr. Colum in sympathetic understanding: Irishmen will think of him with his gentle brother-in-law, Sheehy-Skeffington, as two intellectuals who, after their manner and their light, wrought and thought and died for Ireland. What boots it if one was murdered by a British officer and the other was slain in honourable war by Germans? To Ireland, they are both lovable, and in the Irish mind, their memory shall not fail.... Ireland knows that they were both men of peace and that they both offered their lives for her. England can claim neither. In death, they are divided, but in the heart of Ireland they are one.

In The Day’s Burden, my husband referred to Ireland as the spectre at the Banquet of the Empire. He died that Ireland might not be the spectre at the Peace Conference of Nations.

His last thoughts were with Ireland, and in each letter of farewell written to friends from the battlefield, he protests that he died in her holy cause. His soldier servant, writing home to me, says that on the eve of the battle the officers were served with pieces of green cloth to be stitched on the back of their uniforms, indicating that they belonged to the Irish Brigade. Tom touched his lovingly, saying: Boy, I am proud to die for it! Ireland, Christianity, Europe—that was what he died for. He carried his pack for Ireland and Europe. Now pack-carrying is over. He has held the line. Or, as he says in his last poem to his little daughter, he died—

"Not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,

But for a dream born in a herdsman’s shed,

And for the secret scripture of the poor."

That was the dream that haunted his soul, that impelled him to the last sacrifice, and what a sacrifice! What he gave, he gave well—all his gifts, his passionate freedom-loving heart, his winged and ravening intellect, intimate ties of home and friendship and motherland, his career, and better than career—the chance of fulfilling his hopes for Ireland—he sacrificed all that makes life a great and beautiful adventure. And now that he has died... in the waste and the wreckage paying the price of the dreams that cannot sleep, let not anyone commit that last treachery of travestying his ideals and aspirations.

In his final letter to his brother, written the day before he was killed, he outlined the things for which, had he lived, he would have worked—

If I live I mean to spend the rest of my life working for perpetual peace. I have seen war, and faced modern artillery, and I know what an outrage it is against simple men.

And in another letter, written to me some weeks before he entered the battle of the Somme, he speaks of this mission even more poignantly—

I want to live, too, to use all my powers of thinking, writing and working, to drive out of civilisation this foul thing called War and to put in its place understanding and comradeship. This note, indeed, rings through all his letters like a pleading. If God spares me, I shall accept it as a special mission to preach love and peace for the rest of my life.

It is this that makes his sacrifice doubly great, that he, realising with all the wealth of his abundant imagination the horror and cruelty and outrage of war, should step deliberately from the sheltered ways of peace and security and take his share in the grim and awful job because it was only a hell of suffering but not of dishonour, and through it, over its flaming coals, Justice must walk, were it on bare feet.

Prussia was to him the enemy of peace and civilisation. In almost his last letter, he again emphasises this.

Unless you hate war, as such, you cannot really hate Prussia. If you admit war as an essential part of civilisation, then what you are hating is merely Prussian efficiency.

And with this mission of universal peace mingled his dream of a reconciled Ulster. He knew that there was no abiding cause of disunion between North and South, and hoped that out of common dangers shared and suffering endured on a European battleground, there would issue a United Ireland. For this he counted much on the brotherhood that binds the brave of all the earth. There is a vision of Ireland, he wrote in 1915, better than that which sees in it only a cockpit, or eternal skull-cracking Donnybrook Fair—a vision that sees the real enemies of the nation to be ignorance, poverty, disease; and turning away from the ashes of dead hatreds, sets out to accomplish the defeat of these real enemies. Out of this disastrous war, we may pluck, as France and Belgium have plucked, the precious gift of national unity.

In one of my letters he writes—

One duty does indeed lie before me, that of devoting myself to the working out of a reconciliation between Ulster and Ireland. I feel God speaking to our hearts in that sense out of this terrible war.

In his Political Testament he makes a dying plea for the realisation of his dream.

"Had I lived I had meant to call my next book on the relations of Ireland and England: The Two Fools: A Tragedy of Errors. It has needed all the folly of England and all the folly of Ireland to produce the situation in which our unhappy country is now involved.

"I have mixed much with Englishmen and with Protestant Ulstermen, and I know that there is no real or abiding reason for the gulfs, salter than the sea, that now dismember the natural alliance of both of them with us Irish Nationalists. It needs only a Fiat Lux, of a kind very easily compassed, to replace the unnatural by the natural.

"In the name, and by the seal of the blood given in the last two years, I ask for Colonial Home Rule for Ireland—a thing essential in itself and essential as a prologue to the reconstruction of the Empire. Ulster will agree.

And I ask for the immediate withdrawal of martial law in Ireland, and an amnesty for all Sinn Fein prisoners. If this war has taught us anything it is that great things can be done only in a great way.

As a writer in the Freeman very truly says—

If Tom Kettle could have asked for a gift in return for his great sacrifice, it would have been that a great peace unite the hearts and strivings of all those of his fellow-countrymen who worked for the only land he loved.

Mr. Leslie interpreted his vision exquisitely—

"He did not resent the littleness that had dogged his life and left him lonely at the end—but he looked back and hated the pettiness and meanness which had injured Ireland—which had taken every advantage of Ireland, which had fooled her leaders and shuffled off her children on feeble promises. He asked for that touch of greatness by which alone great things are achieved. Like a